You Need a Modern SEO Strategy. Here's How to Shape One.

You probably know that search engine optimization (or SEO) can help more people find your company's website when they search for businesses like yours online. But when’s the last time you ensured your SEO strategy is following best practices -- and getting the results your business really needs?

Here’s why you need a modern SEO strategy, along with tips on how to build a program that helps you gain tangible results (customers) not just a high ranking, from organic search.

You can use SEO to drive traffic to your business website. But if your visitors can’t find your site or contact you, then you haven’t added much value to your business. First make sure that your website is optimized to convince interested visitors to contact you. That means you need an updated, responsive website design.

If your site isn’t built for today’s best practices, it may not even show up in search results. And outdated sites that don’t provide a great user experience raise a red flag to potential customers. This is amplified if your business doesn’t have a mobile site now that Google warns users when a site is not optimized for mobile viewing. And with scores of consumers searching for local information via mobile, having a mobile site is simply not optional any longer.

The next step is to drive more conversions of site visitors to customers. A great, mobile-optimized design will help with that, but your site also needs to feature multiple contact methods like a phone number, email address, web form and chat so that visitors can reach out to you when they are ready -- and through the method they prefer.

When you have this trifecta of a modern, mobile, and conversion-optimized website, you’re on your way to converting more of the website traffic you get from SEO.

Creating content for search engine optimization.

Search engines love content that’s recent, relevant and authoritative. One of the most challenging aspects of modern SEO is creating content that’s relevant to your business.

Both foundational website content and fresh, timely content (like blog posts) focused around the main topics and keywords of your business can help searchers find your website. To create compelling, search-friendly content, start off with a topic or keyword list that’s relevant to your business, products or services and target location.

Then create relevant, ongoing content about those topics to so that search engines will continually index your site in the search results. The most effective way to do this is to set up a blog and regularly post unique, informative posts that your audience will enjoy.

But, customer-facing content isn’t the only material to focus on. Populate your pages’ metadata fields with important keywords and accurate descriptions of its content. In addition, including on your site semantic markup code (like that found at Schema.org) will emphasize specific information about your business, like the name, business type and location. These back-end tactics can improve how quickly and easily search engines can match your site to specific, localized searches, helping it show up in organic search results.

Using social media and local sites to drive traffic.

Modern SEO doesn’t end with attending to your website. You also need to develop your offsite presence on social media sites, local listings and directories that can help amplify your site's SEO. A presence on social media sites and local directories increases the amount of information that consumers can find about your business when they search.

That’s because social signals and properly configured listings (or “citations”) might influence how search engines surface your website in organic results. Making sure these pages are active and optimized for search can also help them appear in organic-search results for your company's branded or key terms.

Set up your company's profiles on top social media sites (like Facebook, Twitter and Google+) and within important local listings (like those appearing on Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Yelp and CitySearch), populate them with optimized, accurate content and link them back to your business website.

Not only are these third-party sites a key destination for local searchers, but these sources can also signal to search engines that your business website is authoritative and relevant, helping boost its visibility in the search results.

Getting a return on the investment.

Here’s your final test for a truly modern approach to SEO: Once you’re getting site visitors, converting them into customers is the next step involved with gaining a return on the SEO investment. This first means responding to and following up with your site's visitors regularly (via phone and or email) so that they actually become customers.

But also track them back to the marketing source and figure out whether they came to the site from your SEO efforts so you can know if your marketing is working. This can be done through a manual or automated process, but it does require ongoing measurement and monitoring so you can see trends, view results and make adjustments to your program.

What 7 Things Everybody Needs to Know About Google Search Optimization

As one of the most visited websites around the globe, with over 12 billion searches sent through its engine per month and owning 67.5 percent of the U.S. search market, Google can play a huge role in the popularity of your own site. Whether it's business-related or you're just trying to establish yourself as a presence and brand online.

SEO may seem like magic to an outsider. It is a structured approach and measured practice of optimizing your pages (and website) to improve your find-ability factor in search engines. If done right you can get listed on top of the first page of results for your specific keywords. While nothing in life is really free, your listings that are shown in the organic, natural results will not ding your wallet each time a searcher clicks. (That's the model for paid advertising, like Google Adwords).

Here are 7 things that everybody should know about Google search optimization.

1. Google Is Always Evolving

Google is constantly changing and evolving at a high speed, and it has had a steady level of growth over the past decade with new software, patents, products, web properties, and corporate acquisitions accumulating over time.

"Among Google's goals: Improve the user experience by delivering relevant, fresh, quality content and, at the same time, crack down on those using questionable search engine optimization techniques to gain unjustified ranking position." - CIO.com

The index also changes and that alters operations. Due to these changes it's impossible to ever completely comprehend the Google algorithms or make any sort of permanent change to your site that will always comply with the standards that Google is keeping. Add to this the fact that Google's main business is paid advertising and naturally wants businesses and users to engage there.

2. Everybody Wants A Piece Of The Google Action

This might seem obvious. You know at the back of your mind that all of your competitors are also vying for that top spot on the search list.

"If your business has an active, well optimized and maintained website with high quality unique content, then you may find yourself a step ahead already." - SEJ

This isn't enough, however. If your company has no real online presence; has not built trust via quality links or has a random selection of social media profiles, blogs, and widgets that provide little value or tries to manipulate Google to try to acquire high positions unnaturally, you could be losing out. Your competitor may have already overtaken you, and web traffic is decreasing.

3. Quality Matters Most To Google

Believe it or not, one of the most important concepts that you must understand when it comes to Google is that their standards for the quality of content are very high.

Despite the millions of website operators who strive for better rankings within the search engine, the most important parties to Google are their (paid) users, which means that they want to provide content that satisfies and makes readers come back again and again.

4. Structure Your Data When You Can

We know that although not everything needs to be structured and organized into some specific schema, Google prefers structured data as much as possible as it's easier to analyze and requires less computing resources. Google responds by greatly increasing your chances for visibility and traffic. Especially when they know the best data to present to readers, whether it's a product listing, video, news or event announcement.

5. Don't Buy Links, Work For Them

It may be possible to build up the number of links back to your site by purchasing them in some way, but this is viewed as a negative behavior by Google.

The truth is that if you buy your links, then they aren't likely a good representative of how honest your content is. Google is cracking down on this behavior and give out penalties where they see it occurring. Even if you were not aware of it. You can earn links the hard way through great quality information and products that people want to see. It may then be shared naturally.

6. Get On Board With Google+

It hasn't appeared to be one of the most popular social media sites on the internet, but using Google+ does tend to have a correlation with search engine rankings. Your personal network will see it. Even if the use of this tool only provides a miniscule difference in the grand scheme of things, every little bit helps in your online presence building.

7. Get Moving

The content of your site is the most important aspect that Google wants you to focus on for SEO benefit. Rankings may and will come over time, but there are hundreds of factors to the Google algorithm. Content and links are critical, but so is the speed at which your website and pages operate.

Success or failure of your website is ultimately measured in visibility, traffic, stickiness (how long visitor stay and if/when they come back) your message and positioning, as well as conversions (sales). With so many moving parts, make sure your content is readily available and that your pages load fast. Improve your site speed and make users and Google happy in the process.

WHAT'S NEXT?

Before you add a second story to your house or construct a brand new home, be clear on where you are and what you want. For Google SEO, that means getting an SEO Audit.

2014 SEO Trends You Need to Know

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With the recent Panda 4.0 Google algorithm update, SEO is beginning to change in 2014. Changing best practices, keywords and relevancy are just some of the issues businesses now face. It is important to keep up with the latest trends in the space so that your business doesn't find itself on the wrong side of a Google manual penalty that keeps you from showing up in Google's organic results. Here are some trends to take note of when building your business SEO profile in 2014:

Content is king
The ability to create unique, high-quality content is integral for any business' success online. People on the internet are constantly bombarded with hundreds of messages and organic results to choose from when they search for something, so if your content stands out by offering the reader an optimized title and the ability to understand your product or service in a unique way, you'll do much better at capturing their attention than your competitors. Two great options to provide this high quality content is the use of blog posts or whitepapers - however, thinking in broader terms with visual options like videos and infographics can be extremely effective when done correctly as well.

The increasing importance of mobile
The number of people that are using their smartphones and tablets to access the internet is increasing at an extremely fast pace. In today's world of online business, companies that are not optimized for mobile use are putting themselves at a grave disadvantage. A good responsive design can help your business' website keep its look, feel, and integrity across a variety of mobile devices so that anyone viewing your website will get the best experience possible. Search engines like Google are aware of this, and will rank websites with responsive or mobile optimized versions higher than those that don't in organic results.

Conversational search
With the Hummingbird change to the Google search algorithm better handling conversational and long-tail search queries, businesses that are not appropriately optimized will soon find themselves having a harder time ranking well and generating non-branded organic traffic. Optimizing your website for longer tail keywords and phrases will provide more value than ever before and will help to make your website's keyword rankings more diverse.

Links in press releases are great for brand recognition, but not SEO
Toward the end of 2013 and the beginning of 2014, Google officially announced that having links that passed equity ("dofollow") in a press release could be the basis of a manual penalty to a website. This means that businesses that still use or have press releases that link to their business could find their rankings negatively affected. Make sure that if your business has used press releases in the past that you go back and mark those links as "nofollow." They will still provide some SEO value this way without endangering your entire website's organic rankings.

Relevancy of content to website theme
More than ever, the content on your website should be relevant to keywords that relate to your website. This basically means that if you haven't already, make sure that each of your pages makes sense in the grand scheme of your website. So if your business is selling say, cakes, make sure that the content on your website is relevant to cakes and that the keywords you use make sense in that context. This is something that your business ideally should have been doing in an SEO strategy before, but with the new Panda 4.0 update, having content that doesn't make sense with the rest of your website can now actually hurt you.

SEO is ever changing and 2014 isn't an exception. Making sure that your website stays within search engine guidelines by taking these trends into account is extremely important to your organic results. If your business acts quickly, you can take advantage of competitors who have not been following SEO best practices and have been penalized in the wake of Panda 4.0 to help get the most out of these strategies and increase your business' organic rankings.